It is crucial to conduct the land use/cover research to obtain the global change information.Urban area is one of the most sensitive areas in land use/cover change.Therefore land use/cover change in urban areas is very im-portant in global change.It is vital to incorporate the information of urban land use/cover change into the process of decision-making about urban area development.In this paper,a new urban change detection approach,urban dynamic monitoring based on objects,is introduced.This approach includes four steps:1)producing multi-scale objects from multi-temporal remotely sensed images with spectrum,texture and context information;2)extracting possible changed objects adopting object-oriented classification;3)obtaining shared objects as the basic units for urban change detection;4)determining the threshold to segment the changed objects from the possible changed objects using Otsu method.In this paper,the object-based approach was applied to detecting the urban expansion in Haidian District,Beijing,China with two Landsat Thematic Mapper(TM)data in 1997 and 2004.The results indicated that the overall accuracy was about 84.83%,and Kappa about 0.785.Compared with other conventional approaches,the object-based approach was advantageous in reducing the error accumulation of image classification of each datum and in independence to the radiometric correction and image registration accuracy.
